“Is your ex here?” Caroline asked, suddenly nervous at the prospect of meeting the woman. She was unlikely to be as welcoming as Adrian’s roommate.
“No, she said she’s out of town until tomorrow,” Adrian replied, pulling a ring of keys out of his pocket. He looked surprised when his key turned easily in the lock.
Caroline followed him into the house, a little curious as to how a starving artist lived, or had lived until two months ago. She halted in the entryway in surprise.
It was the nicest house she’d ever been in. The floors were polished maple, and the walls were painted white, like a church or a museum. There was only a single ivory-colored scarf hung on the coatrack at the entryway. In the living room, all the furniture was upholstered in shades of soft neutral gray. Everything matched, the house was super clean, and all the furniture and rugs were at precise right angles to everything else. The only color in the room came from the paintings hung on the wall. The effect was at once rich and chilly.
Caroline must have had her thoughts on her face, because Tom sidled up next to her and murmured, “It looks like the set for a diarrhea medication commercial, doesn’t it?”
She snorted at the painful accuracy of that observation. It didn’t look like a place where people actuallylived. She’d be afraid to sit on one of the stiff little couches for fear that she’d knock a mohair throw pillow out of place and disturb the entire arrangement. She wondered whether Adrian had put it all together or whether the place reflected his ex’s tastes instead. Some of the paintings looked like they might be his.
Adrian stomped up the stairs without giving her or Tom any instructions, so she drifted over to a fancy pewter-and-glass console table, where several framed photographs were clustered. All depicted an attractive brunette in her late thirties: at the beach, in an eveninggown, in front of a foreign skyline. Adrian wasn’t in any of them.
“Were they always just of her?” she whispered to Tom, not sure if even muted criticism was wise.
“I think there used to beoneof them together.” Tom smirked, tapping an open space at the end of the table. “But no, this is the temple of Nora. The only thing Adrian designed is the garden out back.”
At that hint of an invitation, Caroline crossed through the kitchen (more white on the cabinets and gray-veined marble on the waterfall island) so she could look out the back window.
“Where’s the garden?” she asked, confused.
Tom lifted his head and came to peer out at the muddy pit behind the house. There was a partially assembled aboveground hot tub on the concrete slab leading into the turfless waste of the backyard, but no plants beyond a couple of adventurous weeds clinging to the overturned dirt. It was a mess, a fresh mess.
Tom started to laugh in dismay. “Oh shit,” he said. “I wonder if he’s seen what happened to his peonies yet.”
From upstairs, there came an echoing curse. Caroline supposed that meant he had.
Adrian could not even bother to be outraged at how Nora had dug up all his flower bushes to install a hot tub. Though that was horrific by itself: What had the Goldflame spirea ever done to her? When she was done being angry at him, wouldn’t she be sorry her backyard looked like Carthage after the Second Punic War?
It got worse though. He knew she was angry at him, but he’d thought throwing him out in the middle of the night was the cruelest move he might expect from hisex-fiancée. Their professional relationship predated their personal one. Nora was a professional. He’d expected her to act like one through the end of the year.
But there was his art on the floor of the guest bedroom. A dozen or more paintings on canvas, all haphazardly tossed together like a discard pile at a garage sale.
He barely dared to move anything for fear that the stack would shift and further damage the paintings, but it looked like Nora had ruthlessly curated everything he’d painted before he met her, then dragged it home in a careless jumble. She’d treated it like trash. Before he met her, he was trash. That was the message.
It had never been displayed at her gallery, but occasionally a collector would come ask after an earlier series, and she’d sell one of Adrian’s first works: big scenes of garden parties and crowded rooms, weighty mounds of flowers weaving among the figures of friends who’d modeled for him. People had liked it. Some critics too. Not Nora.Your technique is decent, Nora had told him at twenty-six, when he’d begun to eye the international market.Are you ready to get serious?
He’d thought so. But wherever Nora had thought he was going with his career or their relationship, he’d never arrived. Now anything that had ever been good or hopeful about the two of them was impossible to remember through the cloudy varnish of years of mutual disappointment.
No doubt drawn by his swearing, Tom and Caroline crept up the stairs to peer into the room after him.
Adrian laced his fingers across the top of his head, counting to ten under his breath. He squatted to gingerly lift the corner of the top painting, recoiling at the dent where an edge had rubbed into the canvas below.
“Fuck,” he muttered again. How had it gotten this bad? He was sure he deserved it on some level for getting involved with his gallery director, but how did five years come to this?
Adrian became aware of Caroline squatting next to him, fingers tentatively stroking his shoulder in consolation. The tiny contact was grounding.
“I’m all right,” he said roughly. He’d spent half a decade with a woman who could do this for nothing more than spite, which probably said things about his judgment that he needed to examine at length, but he wasn’t going to cry about it while Caroline and Tom watched him like he was about to throw himself out the second-floor window.
“Yeah, of course,” Caroline said, still managing to disagree. She looked at the pile. “Jesus and Joseph, what did youdoto her?”
Adrian rubbed his mouth. “I told her I didn’t think we should get married.”
Caroline screwed up her face, trying to understand the position. “Because you decided you’re not a commitment guy?”
“I said I didn’t think we were in a position to be making any vows while she was sleeping with her buyer at Sotheby’s.”
“Ah,” Caroline said, eyebrows shooting up. “Not in a sophisticated, post-monogamy kind of way?”
